A billionaire hedge fund manager’s decision to quit New Jersey for Florida means the struggling state is set to miss out on a desperately-needed $140million in income tax.

David Tepper, 58, has listed a Miami Beach property as his permanent address and registered to vote in the Sunshine State as he bids to move his financial operations south.

However, with an estimated worth of $11.4billion, the decision has rocked income tax estimates in New Jersey where he has lived and operated for several decades.

Frank Haines, a budget officer with the Office of Legislative Services, said: ‘We may be facing an unusual degree of income-tax forecast risk,’ Bloomberg News reported.

This was due to the fact 40 per cent of the state’s revenue comes from income taxes, and a third of this comes from the state’s richest 1 percent.

By comparison, Florida has no income, estate or inheritance taxes, making it an ideal destination to avoid the levies that are compulsory elsewhere.

Mr Tepper made his fortune as a Goldman Sachs junk bond trader in the 1980s, before founding Appaloosa Management in New Jersey in the early 1990s.

He has been called one of the best traders of his generation and his $18.6billion hedge fund has routinely delivered returns so strong that the manager has periodically returned capital to investors because it was getting too large.

He worked for eight years at Goldman Sachs but left to start up his own hedge fund in 1992 after repeatedly being passed over for partnership.

It is thought he made the money by correctly predicting that the US government would not allow major banks to fold that year, compounding his profits as the banks’ share prices then recovered.

In 2009, he made a trade that netted his company $7.5 billion and gave him a payout of nearly $4 billion.